I was fascinated by Roy Bauemeister and John Tierney’s ‘Just Say No’ article in this week’s Sunday Times, because I have long urged my weight loss clients only to focus on the few key habits they most want to change. I intuitively knew that if you changed all your eating habits at once, it wouldn’t be long before you lapsed. This article suggests that we only have a limited supply of will power, and most of us are exhausted by the daily grind of resisting temptation. What’s more, we don’t have a sense of our willpower being depleted as the day goes on, so we become increasingly vulnerable to making impulsive decisions that aren’t going to do us any good long term.
However, I do think there’s a way to make it easier for ourselves. Contrary to accepted wisdom, I believe there’s value in saying ‘ok…I just don’t eat chocolate anymore’. Now…. before you throw your arms in the air and accuse me of heresy……. Yes, I agree that if we make a rule and ban something we love, like chocolate, with all its powerful associations, we thereby risk resistance, and the danger that we will focus on what we can’t have and so want it all the more. That explains why we are always advised, even when trying to lose weight, to have a little of what we fancy. How many times have you read the advice to have ‘just 2 squares of dark chocolate’? One well known weight loss brand calls these little luxuries ‘sins’, and we are allowed a quota of our favourite sins every day.
But what if we could reboot our brain to suggest that chocolate is a fattening, addictive poison that not only makes us fat but also messes with our metabolism big time…and actually, we aren’t going there any more. Now that takes willpower? But in a way, it’s easier when you have taken a non-negotiable position. If we only have a limited supply of willpower, let’s not waste it with endless negotiations about if and when to eat the chocolate, resisting one time but giving in the next. If we reframe our ideas about chocolate, so that it isn’t a treat any more, then we just don’t bother with it. Easier said than done? Well….if we relax into a suggestible state with hypnosis, it’s easier than you might think. Each of the Slimming123 sessions contains powerful suggestions that help clients to change their habits – rewiring their neural pathways so they lose the longing for foods like chocolate.
Self hypnosis enabled me to give up eating sweets, chocolates, sweet pastries, cakes, biscuits and crisps – all at once. I had already convinced myself these things were not what I wanted. I knew I was ready, and I was. Non-negotiable. And what a thrill that returning sense of self control gave.
Here’s an extract from the article, in support of the book ‘Willpower:Rediscovering our Greatest Strength’
Most serious problems centre on a failure of self-control: compulsive spending, underachievement, alcohol and diet abuse, anxiety and anger. Yet ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they will often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humour, creativity, bravery and even modesty. But not self-control.
Yet however you define success — a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, financial security, freedom to pursue your passions — it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate those qualities, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far, nobody has worked out how permanently to increase intelligence, but they have discovered how to improve self-control.
We feel overwhelmed because there are more temptations than ever. Researchers have shown that people spend a quarter of their waking hours resisting desires. Their success is decidedly mixed. After dozens of experiments by psychologists (it has become one of the most intensively studied topics in social science), there is now a new understanding of willpower. We want to tell you what has been learnt about human behaviour, and how you can use it to change yourself for the better. Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges of life.
Boost your willpower by knowing your limits
Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things. Each day may start off with your stock of willpower fresh and renewed — at least if you’ve had a good night’s sleep and a healthy breakfast. But then, all day, things chip and nibble away at it.
Consider some of the things that happen in a typical day. You pull yourself out of bed, even though your body wants more sleep. You put up with traffic frustrations. You hold your tongue when your boss or your husband angers you. You want to eat all the chips on your plate, but you leave half of them there, or (after negotiating with yourself) almost half. You push yourself to go running, and while you run you make yourself keep going until you finish your workout. The willpower you expended on each of these events depletes how much you have left for the others.
This depletion isn’t intuitively obvious, especially when it comes to appreciating the impact of making decisions. Virtually nobody has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Choosing what to have for dinner, where to go on holiday, who to hire, how much to spend — these all take willpower. After making some tough decisions, remember that your self-control is going to be weakened. Remember, too, that what matters is the exertion, not the outcome. If you struggle with temptation and then give in, you’re still depleted because you struggled.
